Tuesday 10 January 2012

Musing on Web design…

I have, at last, downloaded Adobe MUSE to my MacBook. Have been wanting to do this for a few weeks now, since I saw http://www.hug-advertising.co.uk/

Of course, I've read all the concerns many people -- especially 'web designers' -- have about the 'pure code' that's not generated by MUSE but, I still want to give it a go.

In the past, I have been called a programmer: Macromind/Macromedia Lingo (in Director)… a bit of ActionScript too. And, I produced my very frst web pages and web sites by hand using SimpleText back in those dim and distend early/mid nineties when the internet started to get a foothold.

Yes, that was before anybody released a WYSIWYG tool for web page building. Claris were one of the first with Homepage and I immediately started using that, followed by Adobe GoLive and eventually onto Macromedia Dreamweaver.

And who used the code view in the early days of Dreamweaver? Not me, thats for sure. BUt the last thing I made with Dreamweaver -- last week as it happens -- I had code on view all the time. What's more, plenty of the elements won't display unless previewed in the browser!

Now, as graphic designer, that's not the perfect situation: I want to SEE what I'm doing as I'm doing it which was always the great thing about Homepage/GoLIve/Dreamweaver. Since those days and since the advent of CSS and Wordpress and so on, it seems code is king again.

And for people like me, MUSE offers a return to being able to design the web site visually. This IS as important as the nuts and bolts under the bonnet. Too many people call themselves 'web designers' but they design its functionality first and worry about how it looks second. For me, that's the problem with blogger tools: everything looks the same-ish. Works beautifully but dull as dishwater and all the same.

Yes, all this 'pure code' stuff is bunkum. Does the Hug web site work? Yes. What more do you need to know? Mr and Mrs average web viewer doesn't really care about the code and its efficiency.

Anyway, I'll give MUSE a go and let you know what I think.